Overview:
In Richard Morgan’s 2002 debut, cyberpunk is blended seamlessly with hardboiled noir in a futuristic dystopia where the mind can be stored in a mechanical cortical stack and bodies are worn like interchangeable clothes.
Plot Summary:
Six pages into this ~400 pg novel our protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs, is shot and killed.
Next chapter. Kovacs finds himself downloaded into a new body on Earth, light-years away from his home. His mandatory criminal sentence has been given a six-week reprieve courtesy of Mr. Bancroft, a rich, influential Meth (as in Methuselah, who supposedly lived 969 years). Kovacs has been hired based on his reputation for the sole purpose of solving Bancroft’s own death, attributed to suicide by the local police whose advanced forensic techniques have shown no clues or suspects to the contrary. Bancroft finds the diagnosis impossible, since he lacks motive and was surely aware that the large clone facility he owned would immediately place him in a new body (a process known as “re-sleeving”).
Kovacs must find out what happened in the roughly 48 hours that occurred after Bancrofts last remote backup and his violent death. He has a wealth of experience as an Envoy (an elite, but cruel, military organization akin to a space-age Delta Force) and as a criminal of various trades, but he is a cultural outsider on Earth with little in the way of clues or trustworthy allies.
Review:
“Altered Carbon” grafts the style of Mickey Spillane’s amoral criminal underworlds onto the type of dystopic cyberpunk universe recognizable to fans of “The Matrix” or the works of Neal Stephenson. Both halves of Morgan’s well-balanced noir/SF equation merit discussion.
The future-Earth of “Altered Carbon” is informed by the technological, social and pharmaceutical trends available to the culturally literate 21 century writer, an asset that makes Morgan’s book feel viable and contemporary. However, the aesthetic is fairly obvious and familiar by modern standards: neon lit streets (now with ads broadcast directly into the minds of those passing by), unsavory dens of drugs and prostitution, black-clad citizens with biological and synthetic enhancements, etc.
What makes “Altered Carbon” unique is not just the addition of sleeving into new bodies, but the skill with which the idea is executed. The nuances are worked out and plot holes avoided. The background is fed to the reader gradually and in an unobtrusive, highly-integrated way. Most importantly, the implications are fully explored and applied in enough original variations to make the idea seem fresh (although it’s far from new) and sustaining.
The detective/mystery side of the book also draws heavily from its own genre traditions, particularly film noir and the pulp novels of the 1930’s and 1940’s. Morgan doesn’t quite possess the flowery prose stylization of Dashiell Hammett or the cynical weary rasp of Raymond Chandler, but he has the rawness, directness and attitude of Spillane’s best work. The result is that “Altered Carbon” reads quick and hard, chock full of violence, sex and crime in a way that will alienate or disgust the more sensitive and earn dubious accolades from angsty adolescents.
However, woven into the surface qualities that elicit unsophisticated, but fully earned, citations as “cool” and “hip” is a complicated critique of morality gone rotten. Morgan makes his readers cheer for acts of cold-blooded violence one moment and just as easily makes them realize the disturbing or reprehensible implications the next. Kovacs is a remarkably despicable character who earns our redemption (if at all) more through charisma and determination than by possessing the type of underlying personal code trademarked by characters like Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. Kovacs is effective at what he does primarily because he is able to lie and trick, not because he possesses the typical array of cyberpunk hero skills like fighting, hacking or even being observant.
The moral ambiguity and instability mounts steadily, culminating in a series of dark revelations. The narrative makes ample use of genre staples like femme fatales, alley chases, crime lords, vicious assassins and even underground boxing but does so with wit, energy and personal style where baseline originality is lacking. The mystery itself, while slow to get off the ground, is a satisfyingly clever and elaborate plot with the undertone of conspiracy and paranoia that accents the best cases. However, Morgan hasn’t quite gotten the knack of inconspicuously slipping in clues and it’s often obvious when something will later be important because he gives an extra paragraph of explanation more than he usually dedicates to innocent details.
Ultimately, “Altered Carbon” can not really be considered the most important, original, stylish, strange, believable, dark, thoughtful or well-written novel but it scores well across all criteria. Morgan is the type of talented late-comer that re-invigorates material with the Tarantino-type sixth-sense for knowing what to borrow and how to spin it.
Altered Carbon’s release in 2002 stirred quite a bit of hype and a touch of controversy too. It won the Philip K Dick Award and had its film rights snatched up almost immediately for a hefty sum, but received backlash from intellectual quarters such as Inchoatus, whose reviews I usually respect. Make sure to read the accompanying rebuttal.
To cover for my personal bias I’m presenting a more fluid scoring this time around.
My Grade: A+ (not because it’s perfect, but because it’s a personal favorite)
More objectively: A
If you don’t care for one of either cyberpunk or noir: B+
If you don’t care for both cyberpunk and noir: B-
Showing posts with label Postcyberpunk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Postcyberpunk. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Thursday, February 1, 2007
Thoughts on Our Postcyberpunk World
In 1998 Lawrence Person wrote an article called “Notes on a PostCyberpunk Manifesto” (originally from Nova Express linked from its reprint on Slashdot). He defines postcyberpunk as a genre the evolved out of cyberpunk, a transformation centered around leather-clad, motorcycle-riding anti-heroes being replaced by productive average members of fairly functional society.
Person was clearly onto something, although it is tough to say whether the distinction from cyberpunk was enough to merit a new genre. The setting is pretty much the same (futuristic metropolises dominated by technology) and the themes overlap quite a bit (cybergenetics, genetic engineering, technology affecting society, information at the fingertips of anyone, etc). Only the characters have made a significant change of type and this is the key. What Person fails to do, is to contextualize (or historicize if you prefer) this shift.
The construction of the protagonist is, with few exceptions, the window into the ideas, opinions, beliefs and observations of the author. Even anti-heroes define a world-view through what they oppose and unreliable narrators tend to be confused about the very things that the reader (or sometimes society as a whole) also are confused about. Problematic protagonists help define the belief systems of the age they were written in through the very qualities that get them dubbed “problematic.”
When one looks at the shift from the 1980’s into the late 1990’s, we can see many of the changes that are echoed in the literary characters of science fiction. The technology junky, the nerd, the computer user, the programmer and the videogame player all moved from the fringe of society to the center (the motorcyclist and the criminal are left behind). No longer outsiders or anomalies, these figures became commonplace elements of a broad middle-class. The archetypical image of a computer user went from the reclusive, anti-social hacker to the suit-and-tie office worker and the well-adjusted student on a laptop in a café.
That science-fiction urge that has been around for centuries, the desire to picture ourselves and our society in the future, simply followed the current trends as it often does.
One place that Person doesn’t go is into the structure of postcyberpunk, an area that shows as much development as characterization and deserves as much attention as setting and theme. Of great interest is the way that science-fiction has reached out to the technological advances in our society and incorporated them directly into its form. Authors are able to tap the immense amount of data on the internet for research and inspiration. Readers can communicate with each other and provide feedback to the author over long distances in real time or at leisure on discussion groups. Postcyberpunk books even tend to make use conventions borrowed from computer code, emails, discussion and news groups and other means of communication.
Blurring has occurred at the boundaries between mediums (not to mention genres). Evidence of this is visible in internet literature (such as Geoff Ryman’s “253”), manga, graphic novels, videogames, digital artwork and book websites. An emphasis on the interactivity has arisen particularly in highly literate videogames that contain novel length amounts of detail, dialogue and description. Players are given an ever increasing amount of freedom to make choices and customize their experience. The “worldbuilding” to which Lawrence Person refers to has found a new peak in massively multiplayer online games with their own internal societies and economies. Immersion for even conventional literature material is enhanced by television, movie and game adaptations creating multi-media, in-depth story-universes like “Star Trek” and “Ghost in the Shell.”
Immersion into online communities, games and globally popular story-universes has changed from being escapism to involvement. Those people who continue to reject technology are the ones being cut off from society. This is as much a matter of mass communication (cell phones, email, AIM, news sites, digital cameras, uploading) as culture (literature, art, shows, movies, games).
While many of these changes are not the sole property of the 90’s and 00’s (the 80’s saw the rise of “synergy” and cross-media marketing tie-ins), it is postcyberpunk material that seems to most frequently reflect these changes. While early science-fiction literature was showing the dangers of technology and dystopia, it tended to set literature in opposition to or in rejection of the future (think “Fahrenheit 451” or the reduction of vocabulary with double-speak in “1984”). In cyberpunk literature the protagonist is fully complicit (and often ahead of the curve) in the onrush of technological progress. The character has willingly given up the page for the computer screen, the physical for the virtual, and has found freedom (both artistically and literally) in a technological expression. Now, in the postcyberpunk era, it is the author and the reader who are undergoing these same changes. Society has begun to accept technological advances as less of an inevitable threat and more as a logical extension of scientific and social possibilities. The literature community, particularly the science-fiction community, has likewise come to accept technology as enabling their artistic freedom rather than destroying it.
This is why I think we can expect postcyberpunk literature to continue growing in output and popularity. For the time being, at least, we live in a postcyberpunk world.
Person was clearly onto something, although it is tough to say whether the distinction from cyberpunk was enough to merit a new genre. The setting is pretty much the same (futuristic metropolises dominated by technology) and the themes overlap quite a bit (cybergenetics, genetic engineering, technology affecting society, information at the fingertips of anyone, etc). Only the characters have made a significant change of type and this is the key. What Person fails to do, is to contextualize (or historicize if you prefer) this shift.
The construction of the protagonist is, with few exceptions, the window into the ideas, opinions, beliefs and observations of the author. Even anti-heroes define a world-view through what they oppose and unreliable narrators tend to be confused about the very things that the reader (or sometimes society as a whole) also are confused about. Problematic protagonists help define the belief systems of the age they were written in through the very qualities that get them dubbed “problematic.”
When one looks at the shift from the 1980’s into the late 1990’s, we can see many of the changes that are echoed in the literary characters of science fiction. The technology junky, the nerd, the computer user, the programmer and the videogame player all moved from the fringe of society to the center (the motorcyclist and the criminal are left behind). No longer outsiders or anomalies, these figures became commonplace elements of a broad middle-class. The archetypical image of a computer user went from the reclusive, anti-social hacker to the suit-and-tie office worker and the well-adjusted student on a laptop in a café.
That science-fiction urge that has been around for centuries, the desire to picture ourselves and our society in the future, simply followed the current trends as it often does.
One place that Person doesn’t go is into the structure of postcyberpunk, an area that shows as much development as characterization and deserves as much attention as setting and theme. Of great interest is the way that science-fiction has reached out to the technological advances in our society and incorporated them directly into its form. Authors are able to tap the immense amount of data on the internet for research and inspiration. Readers can communicate with each other and provide feedback to the author over long distances in real time or at leisure on discussion groups. Postcyberpunk books even tend to make use conventions borrowed from computer code, emails, discussion and news groups and other means of communication.
Blurring has occurred at the boundaries between mediums (not to mention genres). Evidence of this is visible in internet literature (such as Geoff Ryman’s “253”), manga, graphic novels, videogames, digital artwork and book websites. An emphasis on the interactivity has arisen particularly in highly literate videogames that contain novel length amounts of detail, dialogue and description. Players are given an ever increasing amount of freedom to make choices and customize their experience. The “worldbuilding” to which Lawrence Person refers to has found a new peak in massively multiplayer online games with their own internal societies and economies. Immersion for even conventional literature material is enhanced by television, movie and game adaptations creating multi-media, in-depth story-universes like “Star Trek” and “Ghost in the Shell.”
Immersion into online communities, games and globally popular story-universes has changed from being escapism to involvement. Those people who continue to reject technology are the ones being cut off from society. This is as much a matter of mass communication (cell phones, email, AIM, news sites, digital cameras, uploading) as culture (literature, art, shows, movies, games).
While many of these changes are not the sole property of the 90’s and 00’s (the 80’s saw the rise of “synergy” and cross-media marketing tie-ins), it is postcyberpunk material that seems to most frequently reflect these changes. While early science-fiction literature was showing the dangers of technology and dystopia, it tended to set literature in opposition to or in rejection of the future (think “Fahrenheit 451” or the reduction of vocabulary with double-speak in “1984”). In cyberpunk literature the protagonist is fully complicit (and often ahead of the curve) in the onrush of technological progress. The character has willingly given up the page for the computer screen, the physical for the virtual, and has found freedom (both artistically and literally) in a technological expression. Now, in the postcyberpunk era, it is the author and the reader who are undergoing these same changes. Society has begun to accept technological advances as less of an inevitable threat and more as a logical extension of scientific and social possibilities. The literature community, particularly the science-fiction community, has likewise come to accept technology as enabling their artistic freedom rather than destroying it.
This is why I think we can expect postcyberpunk literature to continue growing in output and popularity. For the time being, at least, we live in a postcyberpunk world.
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